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By the time widespread private fears of war had risen to the headlines, and to the public consciousness, the statesmen were beginning to feel that they had affairs under control. Ben-Gurion hastily reversed his talk of the victory's spoils, agreed to withdraw from Sinai. The Anglo-French hastened to comply with the null plea for an early and easy take-over in Suez by a U.N. police force of soldiers from the small powers. The Middle East crisis became a race between the U.N.—trying for a peace before the Russians could intervene—and the Russians, hastening to raise "volunteers"' by the thousands (and in entire army reserve units), perhaps to move into the Middle East under the guise of peacemakers.
Skillfully, Swedish U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold set about raising the small-power force prescribed by the General Assembly. Within the week he had arranged with seven governments to provide policing troops. The U.S. Defense Department was ready with planes and equipment to ferry some of the force into operation. Switzerland (which is not a U.N. member) was so scared out of its neutrality that it made arrangements for Swissair to airlift 400 men a day from Italy to Cairo.
To the Swift. By week's end the race seemed to be going to the swift. Dag Hammarskjold. working for peace with the kind of quiet effectiveness that would win medals in war, did not wait for the necessary final consent from Egypt's Premier Nasser to assemble the first big contingent of policemen. He set up a U.N. staging area outside Naples, began assembling there 6,000 soldiers from Denmark, Norway, Canada, Colombia. Finland. India and Sweden, for the hop into the Suez area. As they got set. Russia put out a warning that its "volunteers'" would be "allowed" to go into the Middle East un less the British, French and Israeli forces withdrew from Egyptian soil. Red China joined in with talk of 250,000 "volunteers" (the difficulty of transporting them to Egypt boggled the imagination).
As the U.N. force moved in. the pretext for Soviet intervention would vanish. But the conditions that made the threat possible—the hatreds and tensions, the obvious advantage to the Kremlin of involving the West in a drawn-out and profitless war there—remain.